Chinese President to Seek New Relationship With U.S. in Talks

President Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, met with the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, Gen. Fan Changlong, on Tuesday in Beijing.Credit
Pool photo by Alexander F. Yuan

BEIJING — China’s new president, Xi Jinping, took a hands-on approach on Monday while meeting with President Obama’s national security adviser to prepare the agenda for the California summit meeting between the two leaders next week.

He dispensed with the big upholstered chairs that have for decades been the signature of the Great Hall of the People and, seated opposite the American adviser, Tom Donilon, at a long, polished wooden table, got immediately to the point.

The relationship between the United States and China stands at a “critical juncture,” he said, adding that it is time to explore “a new type of great power relationship.”

Mr. Xi and Mr. Obama will meet over two days at Sunnylands, an estate east of Los Angeles, in what is being billed as a get-to-know-you retreat for the two leaders as they define their countries’ relationship.

Their wives, Michelle Obama and Peng Liyuan, will also be there, and a person familiar with the planning said the leaders would have plenty of time to talk informally, undistracted by the constant motion and public scrutiny of meetings in Washington.

Mr. Donilon wound up his two-day visit to Beijing on Tuesday night after meeting the vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission, Gen. Fan Changlong, an indication that the mounting distrust between the American and Chinese militaries will be discussed in California.

In a public statement before the closed-door session with General Fan, Mr. Donilon repeated the Obama administration’s desire for stronger strategic communications between the two militaries and for joint, rather than competitive, efforts to deal with regional problems in Asia.

Mr. Xi’s blunt focus on a new relationship with the United States puts that notion at the center of the summit meeting, Chinese and American analysts said, although few were sure what specifically Mr. Xi, who is regarded as a man of big ambitions and a friend of the military, had in mind.

Even before assuming the presidency in March, Mr. Xi mentioned the desire for a new relationship, alluding to it on his visit to Washington as vice president in February 2012.

Earlier this year, officials from the Foreign Ministry met with professors of international relations in Beijing to discuss how best to define the “great power relationship,” but no one knew how to flesh it out, several professors said.

Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said both sides were “struggling to conceptualize what a new type of great power relationship might be.”

It is a given, Chinese and American analysts say, that Mr. Xi and his advisers are referring to the historical problem of what happens when an established power and a rising power confront each other. The analysts said the Chinese were well aware of the example of the Peloponnesian War, which was caused, according to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, by the fear that a powerful Athens instilled in Sparta.

Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University and an occasional adviser to the Chinese government, offered some ideas of what Mr. Xi has in mind.

“He wants the American president to recognize that China is dramatically rising in military and economic ways, and he wants the president to know that he is active in world diplomacy,” Mr. Shi said. “If the American president recognizes all of these things, then Xi can be nicer, nicer in his definition, in a very tense situation.”

Mr. Xi has already been more strategic, confident and successful in foreign policy than his immediate predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, Mr. Shi said.

“Under Xi, we can have some big gives and big takes,” some of which could be unveiled by the Chinese leader in California, Mr. Shi said.

The Global Times, a newspaper that often defends the Chinese Communist Party, reported Tuesday on the changes in China’s policy toward North Korea that it said were in the United States’ interest.

“The former administration always put ensuring the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula in first place, while the current administration sets the denuclearization of the peninsula first,” the paper quoted Zhang Liangui, of the Communist Party School of the Central Committee, as saying.

China will no longer “indulge” North Korea’s weapons program at the cost of instability in North Asia, Mr. Zhang said. This brought China and the United States closer together, Mr. Zhang said.

Mr. Shi said Mr. Xi would show his toughness to Mr. Obama over Japan. The Chinese president is likely to tell Mr. Obama that Beijing “cannot tolerate the behavior” of Japan over the Diaoyu Islands — known as the Senkaku in Japan — in the East China Sea. China has pressed Japan militarily and diplomatically over ownership of the islands since September.

The hard-line policy toward Japan has a larger goal, Mr. Shi said. Mr. Xi “is looking for more strategic space in the western part of the Pacific, so that American strategic weapons will not be able to pass through the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea,” Mr. Shi said. “He won’t say this specifically at the meeting with the American president. He will say it in broader, more ambiguous language.”

Aside from the overarching relationship between China and the United States, a range of specific issues will be discussed at Sunnylands, American and Chinese analysts said.

The United States is most concerned about Chinese cyberattacks and the theft of industrial secrets, and China is likely to seek to play down those issues, the analysts said. Discussions about North Korea, the global economy, the East China Sea and the South China Sea are likely be on the agenda, they said.

But the analysts expect less detail in the talks and fewer specific outcomes than are usual at formal, fast-paced summit meetings.

There has already been modest progress in communication between the two militaries, American officials said.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, spoke by telephone last Wednesday with General Fan, the result of a pledge last month that they would talk on a more regular basis.

Correction: May 31, 2013

An article on Wednesday about a meeting Tuesday in Beijing between China’s new president, Xi Jinping, and President Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, paraphrased incorrectly, in some editions, from comments by Zhang Liangui, of the Communist Party School of the Central Committee, that were reported Tuesday in The Global Times. Mr. Zhang said China’s decision to no longer “indulge” North Korea’s weapons program at the cost of instability in North Asia will bring China and the United States closer together — not China and North Korea.

A version of this article appears in print on May 29, 2013, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Chinese President to Seek New ‘Power Relationship’ in Talks With Obama. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe